A review on Namık Kemal's theaters in terms of the world of values

Societies form their cultures through the value judgments within their own history and universal values passed down from generation to generation. Material and spiritual values that constitute culture determine our lifestyles and guide our behaviors and decisions. A person's life between birth and death is based on certain values, and a person tries to make sense of life in this way. We can create radical changes by finding the sense of meaning we are looking for through values. Namık Kemal is one of our Tanzimat period writers who took his place in Turkish literature with his unique identity and wanted to guide society through literature. He produced works in many genres such as theater, novel, and newspaper writing in Tanzimat period Turkish literature. He is a master artist who addressed the problems of society, especially with his theater plays. Namık Kemal's theaters are based on the political upheavals and social changes experienced in the Ottoman Empire. Values have a transformative effect on societies. Namık Kemal, who uses theater works to achieve his goal, expresses them as an entertaining school, and the data that is the subject of research on the world of values is provided through Namık Kemal's plays. In Namık Kemal's plays, which are committed to traditions, we find traces of history and come across the positive characteristics of Turkish society. Namık Kemal generally aims to convey messages to the reader by addressing historical and social events in his plays, to direct the reader to think and to raise awareness. Namık Kemal conveys to the reader what kind of world he wants through his plays. His plays mostly draw attention to national values. The purpose of the research is to examine Namık Kemal's plays in the context of sensitivity to values. Namık Kemal, who has six plays named Vatan Yahut Silistre, Zavallı Çocuk, Akif Bey, Gülnihal, Celaleddin Harzemşah and Kara Bela, emphasizes in his letters that his favourite genre is theatre. His plays are mostly in the drama genre. The characters that Namık Kemal idealized in his plays are people who love their country and nation, are free, fair, hardworking, honest, self-sacrificing and heroic. While he made a strong social criticism in his plays, he also reflected the realities of his time. Namık Kemal wanted to ensure national unity and solidarity with positive human characters and glorified these values by uniting the characters of his plays around values such as love, affection, patriotism, heroism, self-sacrifice, justice and human rights. The author also drew attention to the destruction that could occur in society as a result of people losing their values with negative human characters.